“What?” Saul dropped to one knee and grasped Tanner’s shoulders. “Hey, her death is not on you. It’s on us, the PTAD. We were the ones responsible for rescuing those girls. And we failed because we weren’t good enough, because our enemies were stronger and smarter than us. You, on the other hand…”
He let out a bitter laugh. “You were way better than you had any right to be. If it wasn’t for you swooping in at the moment of truth, all three girls would’ve died, and revenants all around the world would have been in for a rude awakening. You salvaged our failing operation with an incredible Hail Mary, and we owe you big time for that. I owe you big time for that.”
Tears sprang to Tanner’s eyes, but he held them at bay. He didn’t want to cry in front of the vampire, who was watching them with mild interest. Trying to tamp down his turbulent emotions—this day had just been way too much—he made a pale attempt at a joke. “So does this mean you’re not going to lecture me about flagrantly disobeying your orders to stay out of harm’s way?”
“Oh, you wish.” Saul snorted. “I am going to ream you out for that. But not tonight.” He patted Tanner’s shoulder and coaxed him to stand. “I think we’ve all had enough conflict for one day.”
“I concur,” Bankroft said, and he actually sounded like he meant it. “Shall we head back to the church now?”
“Yes, we shall,” Saul retorted, before returning his attention to Tanner. “You want me to carry that?”
Tanner glanced down. Excalibur was still gripped firmly in his hand. He’d completely forgotten it was there, and he had no idea how he hadn’t dropped it during the scuffle with the sable wight. “I know it’s stupid, but I want to put it back in the box myself, for…for Kim.”
Saul gave him a sympathetic look. “She passed on after the protective spell failed, didn’t she?”
Tanner nodded solemnly. “I wished she’d lasted long enough to see the sword put back in its proper place.”
“She’s a revenant. She’ll find out about it one day, when her next incarnation comes looking for the sword.” Saul wrapped an arm around Tanner, drawing him close. “And I’m sure she’ll be just as proud of you as I am.”
Tanner relaxed in Saul’s embrace, letting him carry most of the weight. “You’re proud of me?”
“I am. Very.”
“Good. I’m proud of you too.”
Part Four
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Saul
Clusterfuck was not a strong enough word to describe the fallout of the church battle. Or so Saul Reiz believed as he sat down in a chair in front of Roland’s desk at the crack of dawn the following morning.
Firstly, Patty Dewitt, a teenage girl that the PTAD was supposed to save, had been killed, along with a well-respected combat wizard who wasn’t even thirty. Both their bodies had been badly damaged, the girl’s by the fire Saul had set to destroy the magic circle, and Lehigh’s by the large section of the church floor that had crushed her.
Understandably, the families of both victims were extremely upset when they visited Momo’s morgue to perform the identification and sign the paperwork to have the bodies released. The parents of Patty Dewitt were demanding an investigation into how and why their daughter had been killed, and they were threatening to sue for seven figures if they weren’t given a satisfactory answer.
The other two sets of parents weren’t happy either. Despite lacking the Third Sight, the surviving girls had seen enough to traumatize them for life. They were going to be in therapy for a long time, and their parents were looking for someone to blame for their battered states of mind.
Secondly, even the people who survived the fight were in poor shape. Frasier’s eye had been split in half by a lucky swipe from a valraven. He was laid up in the infirmary, with Laura breaking out every healing remedy she knew to try and save the eye.
Frasier’s two teammates weren’t much better off. One had taken a bad blow to the head and was nursing a concussion, and the other had to have a manticore’s claw surgically removed from his arm.
The remaining three members of Cassidy’s team had all taken a beating as well. They’d spent the whole night after the battle having bones set and wounds stitched.
Jack and Jill were also stuck in the infirmary. Jack had hurt himself so badly trying to break through multiple shields that he’d overtaxed his werewolf healing factor and gotten stuck in wolf form for twelve hours while his litany of injuries slowly resolved. Jill, on the other hand, had been savagely tackled by a harpy, and had earned herself an arm broken in two places, along with a sprained ankle and a black eye.
As for Adeline? Well, she’d pushed her necromancy skills to the breaking point. Literally.
Not two minutes after she finished deconstructing the last chimera, she had had a grand mal seizure. She had two more on the harried drive back to the Castle, and she hadn’t been able to rest comfortably until Laura administered a large dose of anti-seizure medication, followed by seven different healing tinctures. This morning, she was suffering from a killer migraine, complete with nausea and double vision.
Thirdly, the church was a total loss. Saul’s dumb decision to set the valravens on fire had resulted in a blaze so hot and extensive that the building had burned all the way down to the foundation. Nothing could be salvaged, and the PTAD was going to have to pay full freight for the rebuild after the insurance company finished screaming in their ear.
On top of that, dozens of headstones had been damaged, and every grave desecrated when Adeline reanimated all the corpses to fight Slade the necromancer. The PTAD was going to have to pay to fix that mess too, and they were probably also going to have to pay several families hush money so they didn’t go to the press and proclaim that the FBI had a penchant for grave-robbing.
Fourthly, Elliot Bankroft was beyond pissed off that the man who cursed Moretti, likely Val and Slade’s boss, hadn’t shown his face at the church. The curse would remain intact until that man was located and “handled” in the unique way that vampires generally dealt with such offenses.
Every day that went by with no resolution, the curse would drain a little bit more of Moretti’s life away. Judging by the current rate of progression, she had about three months left before her immortal life came to a painfully early end.
Sofia Moretti was Bankroft’s favorite among his servants, by an order of magnitude, and he would move heaven and earth to keep her safe. If it came down to a choice between saving thousands of mundane humans or preserving Moretti’s life, Bankroft would, without a doubt, choose the latter.
Bound as they were by treaties between the US government and the vampire shadow nation, the PTAD would be unable to stop him. All they’d be allowed to do was sweep up the mess he left in his wake, and bury all the bodies.
Fifthly, and most damningly, an entire bloodline of psychometrists had been wiped out by the blood curse, and the psychic community was holding the PTAD accountable for their deaths. In their opinion, Jack and Jill had failed to adequately impart the threat level of the situation, and therefore, they were partially responsible for the tragic consequences of the curse.
It was going to take a hefty settlement to the National Psychometrist Guild to appease the psychic community—and decades of pleading to repair the relationship between the two groups.
Sixthly, and finally, the bad guys had gotten away. Besides Don and Drew, who were just low-level mooks peripherally connected to the ritual scheme, no other arrests had been made, so the PTAD couldn’t even claim that all the pain and suffering was worth it.
All in all, this was by far the worst resolution to a case that Saul had witnessed in his time as a PTAD agent, and the repercussions would be felt for years. So he was practically quaking in his boots as Roland strode into the office, wearing yesterday’s suit, and dropped into his desk chair like a deflating balloon, shoulders slumping, head drooping, a long sigh whistling through his lips.
Roland had yelled at Saul before, but though Saul had made
numerous gaffes since being assigned to Weatherford, he’d never been involved in a fuckup half this serious. Consequently, a voice in the back of Saul’s head kept telling him that this meeting was going to end with an enormous lightning bolt frying him to a crisp.
The only thing that kept him from cowering behind a chair was the presence of Romano and Berkowitz in the chairs to his right. Logic told Saul that Roland wouldn’t brazenly murder him when there were two witnesses in the room. Unless he’s planning to kill us all so he can free up space for more competent agents…
After a minute of absolute silence, Roland finished gathering his thoughts and opened his mouth. Saul flinched, expecting a thunderous explosion, but Roland sounded more resigned than anything else as he spoke.
“As of the end of my phone call with the director”—his eye twitch implied that phone call had not gone well—“every PTAD office in the country has been informed of the danger posed by the unnamed criminal group that consists of the revenant sorceress ‘Val,’ the revenant necromancer ‘Slade,’ and their leader, who is yet nameless.
“An APB has been put out on all three, and sketches of the sorceress and the necromancer have been provided to all PTAD teams assigned to patrol duty. If they show their faces in the preternatural community of any locale where we have an office, every available agent in that locale will jump on them immediately.”
Saul wanted to think that sort of standing order would be enough to stop these people. But after last night, he wasn’t sure it would shake out that way.
“What about the mass revenance event?” he asked Roland. “Has anything come of that yet?”
Roland shook his head. “The magical disturbance was noticed by a broad range of preternaturals throughout most of the western hemisphere, but thus far, there’s been radio silence regarding revenants woken by the ritual.”
“Which means we won’t know exactly why the Terrible Trio tried so hard to set that ritual off,” Saul said, “until the newly woken revenants do something…significant.”
Roland sighed again. “So it seems. We have no way to track revenants down. All we can do is watch and wait.”
Saul massaged his temples. He had a pounding headache after last night’s battle, having been banged around and knocked down countless times. His own visit to the infirmary had lasted forty minutes, during which he’d had three fingers splinted, his left wrist immobilized by a brace, his chest wrapped to take pressure off three cracked ribs, and five different lacerations closed with a grand total of forty-seven stitches.
He was better off than a lot of people, but he was still going to feel that fight for a long while.
Scratching his stubbly chin, Romano awkwardly asked, “Is that all, boss?”
“Not that we’re trying to rush you,” Berkowitz threw in.
“There is one more item we need to cover,” Roland said. “The matter of Ed Muntz.”
Saul perked up. “Has he been found?”
“I’m afraid not.” Roland cracked his knuckles one by one. “Don and Drew broke under interrogation early this morning and gave us the address of Muntz’s latest safe house. But when the SWAT team broke down the door, they found it empty. Muntz must have discovered that we scooped up the brothers and wrote the safe house off as compromised.
“He’s in the wind for now. But we will find him, Saul. I promise you that. He’s got a connection to the man leading this ‘Terrible Trio,’ as you put it, and I plan to exploit that to the fullest extent.”
Roland gestured to Romano and Berkowitz. “That’s why I invited you two here. I’m pulling your teams off patrol and off call indefinitely. Effective immediately, you will dedicate all your resources to finding Ed Muntz and bringing him in—alive.”
The two team leaders glanced at each other, passing an unreadable message between them, then said in unison, “Yes, sir.”
Romano turned to Saul. “We’ll get the bastard, Reiz. I swear it.”
“Me too,” Berkowitz added. “We will get justice for your brother.”
Saul smiled weakly. Romano’s and Berkowitz’s teams weren’t the strongest that the Weatherford office had to offer, but they were solid, and the two team leaders were hardworking, honest men. “Thanks, guys. I appreciate that.”
Roland gestured to the door and said to the pair, “Go gather your teams and get started. I want detailed progress reports on my desk every evening until Muntz is caught.”
“Yes, sir,” they said again and hustled out of the room.
Once the door clicked shut behind them, Roland rested his hands on the desktop and said, “We need to talk about your brother.”
Saul had already felt uneasy facing down Roland on his own, and that declaration did not help. “Look, if this is about Tanner’s involvement in the fight at the church—”
“It’s not.” He extended one finger to indicate Saul should remain quiet until prompted to speak. “Tanner did what needed to be done—what none of our agents could manage to do—and I commend him for that. Even though he acted with zero authority, creating yet another legal quandary for me to resolve, and inadvertently made himself a liability by crash-landing in the middle of the battlefield.
“But really, I won’t punish him for doing the right thing, however haphazardly he did it. Because it’s our fault, my fault, for being so wholly underprepared to face certain criminal elements, that such a dire situation arose in the first place.”
Saul tugged at his shirt collar, asking for permission to speak. Roland dropped the caution finger, so Saul said, “Okay, but if that’s all going to be swept under the rug, then why do you look so grave?”
“Three reasons.” Tiny sparks started dancing between his fingers, a clear sign of agitation. “You want me to start with the lightest blow or the hardest?”
“Um, let’s go with the lightest?” Saul wasn’t sure he’d recover from taking the “hardest blow,” whatever it was, in time to process anything else during this meeting.
“The lightest it is,” Roland said evenly. “We can’t let your brother fully resume his mundane life.”
“Huh?” Saul tightly gripped his pants legs. “What do you mean?”
“Originally, the plan was to simply place protections around his apartment and on his person so that the Muntz incident couldn’t be repeated. But now that we know the ‘Terrible Trio’ are one, up to something dangerous involving Arthurian revenants, and two, are keeping tabs on you and your brother, presumably to ensure you can’t interfere with their plans…
“Well, we can’t just leave your brother with meager defenses like wards and charmed trinkets. He needs training, Saul, and a lot of it. He’s got a great deal of power, and he needs to learn how to use it so he can fight off any agents of this mysterious ‘big boss’ who come calling in the future.”
Saul’s heart palpitated, and he squeaked out, “You’re not suggesting we recruit Tanner to the PTAD?”
Roland shook his head. “No, no. Nothing that extreme. I’m merely suggesting that we put him through the academy training course, so that he can improve his combat skills and come to practice proper wizardry. But that course is, as you know, a major commitment and a difficult challenge. Most people wash out by the six-week mark.
“Your brother can’t wash out. He has to gain the skills necessary to properly defend himself against these revenant criminals. Or he could end up in an even worse situation than the one Ed Muntz put him in.”
Saul bobbed his head. “Yeah, okay. You’re right. We can’t have a guard detail on him all day, every day. He has the power to guard himself, obviously, so he should learn how to use it.”
“To that end,” Roland continued, “I expect you to take some of your off hours to help him learn. You two have similar abilities, so you should be able to adequately train him.”
The emphasis on “similar” set off Saul’s suspicion meter. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“There’s nothing I’m not telling you. We’re coming up on point two
out of three right now.” Roland splayed his hands flat against the table, something he only ever did when he was struggling to figure out how to phrase something in a way that wouldn’t make the listener blow a gasket.
Saul groaned. “Oh, just spit it out, will you?”
Roland gave him a critical look.
“Uh, please spit it out, sir?” he amended.
“Very well.” Roland leaned back in his chair. “There’s no easy way to explain this, so I’m just going to keep it as simple as possible: you are not a complete revenant.”
Saul blinked, uncomprehending. “Come again?”
“You and your brother each possess one half of Merlin’s soul,” he replied. “Your brother hit his revenance point yesterday, when he was being tortured by the sable wight. His revenance is the reason that you fainted here in my office. Because that spiritual disturbance also resonated through your half of Merlin’s soul.
“That split soul is why you possess an incomplete set of Merlin’s memories. It has nothing to do with the car accident that put you in a coma, and it never did. Half of Merlin’s memories weren’t in your head to begin with. They’re in your brother’s head. Or rather, in the half of Merlin’s soul that resides within your brother’s body.”
The world seemed to tip sideways, as if Saul was on a violently rocking boat. Then panic crashed into the stern of that boat at a hundred knots, capsizing it into a white-capped sea. The next thing Saul knew, he was on his knees, vomiting all over Roland’s expensive antique carpet.
A disgusted groan emanated over the top of the desk. “Are you finished?”
Saul almost said yes—before he threw up again. The second round was mostly yellow bile, and as it came to settle atop the remains of the bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit Saul had eaten for breakfast, the nausea largely subsided because there was nothing left for the panic to purge.
Heaving himself back into the chair, Saul slumped against the cushion. His heart raced a mile a minute. His pulse roared loudly in his ears. And a feeling of impending doom sat so heavily inside his chest that he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
A Knight of Cold Graves (The Revenant Reign Book 1) Page 36